When a certain praise song is sung at our church, my wife refuses to sing a particular line. It’s Stuart Townend’s “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us,” and the line is, “The Father turns his face away…,” sung about Jesus hanging on the Cross. Beth says that’s simply not true. The Father did not turn away from His Son Jesus as He died on the Cross. If that were true, the Trinity would be broken and God would not be God.
The understanding that the Father “turned His back” on Jesus on the Cross is partially motivated by an atonement theology which goes (this is admittedly a hasty and sketchy outline) something like this, drawn partially, but not wholly, from Anselm:
1) There is an infinite penalty for sin, which is death.
2) On the Cross, all the sins of all humankind were loaded on Jesus and He bore the penalty for them all in His own death.
3) Drawing on Isaiah 59:2 and Habakkuk 1:13, then, it is asserted, God cannot look on sin.
4) Therefore, as Christ bore all the sins of the world on the Cross, God had to turn away and not look at all that evil.
There are several problems with the theology outlined in 1) – 4) above. But this Sunday we take up what has typically been called the “Cry of Dereliction” as the fourth word from the Cross, found in Matthew 27:45-47 and Mark 15:33-35. That cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (which is the first verse of Psalm 22) is often taken to be direct confirmation of the notion that God the Father turned away from Jesus on the Cross. Jesus is simply expressing His actual experience of abandonment by the Father in those moments.
As Thomas Aquinas might say at this point, sed contra (“on the contrary”). Both the atonement theology and the understanding of the eloi, eloi cry which lead to Townend’s and others’ idea that the Father turned away from Jesus as He died are mistaken. It’s hard to know quite where to start in answer that idea, but Psalm 22 itself is as good as any. As the psalm describes many afflictions which seem to hauntingly foreshadow the crucifixion, Psalm 22:24 declares, “For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.” I’m tempted to say that’s enough right there for us to toss out that “the Father turned his face away” line. However, we can say more.
The most trenchant theological objection to the concept that God the Father had to actually abandon His Son on the Cross is the very nature of God as Trinity. Trinitarian theology is enormously complex, but all orthodox Christians agree that however Father, Son and Holy Spirit are related, there is a deep, essential, eternal unity between them. It’s not the sort of unity which can be abandoned, even for a short time, without God ceasing to be what God always is, three persons in one God.
We can also add that other Scriptures seem to tell against Jesus being abandoned by the Father on the Cross. In John 16:32 Jesus tells the disciples they will abandon Him and leave him alone, “Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me.” And several of the other words from the Cross imply that close relation with Father continuing even on the Cross. Jesus asks the Father to forgive those who crucified Him. Jesus promises the repentant thief a place in Paradise. At the end, in Luke 23:46, Jesus addresses the Father directly, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” It is hard to discern what that last prayer means if the Father has actually turned away and is not attending to Jesus.
What then does the cry of dereliction mean? If it’s not an expression of actual abandonment by God, then what is it? One alternative has been, as I implied by quoting a later verse from Psalm 22, to refer to the well-documented practice of invoking a whole passage of Scripture, particularly a psalm, by reciting its first line. We do much the same by referring to hymns by their first lines. Thus Jesus cry from an Aramaic version of Psalm 22, Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani, is actually meant to be His affirmation of the whole psalm, which ends on a note of vindication and victory and deliverance by God. So it is not a cry of abandonment or despair, but a confession of faith and trust like the psalmist’s own.
I think that first line invocation of the whole of Psalm 22 is a correct way of understanding this fourth word from the Cross. However, I also want to say that on the Cross Jesus experiences and then gives voice to the very human feelings of distress that anyone dying in such a way would feel. He enters fully into the emotional state of humanity as it confronts its self-imposed (the real meaning of the Isaiah and Habakkuk verses about God not looking on sin) distance from God.
Lastly, though, as Richard John Neuhaus writes in Death on a Friday Afternoon, the cry of dereliction must be read in harmony with what Jesus says in John 10:18, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” So Neuhaus says that abandonment in the cry of dereliction is self-abandonment. Jesus submits His life to the Father. Thus, “it becomes clear that the secret of the cry of dereliction is that the abandonment by God is the abandonment to God.” This is seen by the fact that even as He calls out God’s forsaking, to Jesus the Father is still “My God.”
Understood in Neuhaus’s way, the cry of dereliction becomes a great model for our own times of extreme suffering. As we cry out feelings of abandonment, even by God, we may also realize ourselves then so abandoned to the tender, everlasting care of the One who is also our God.